PPE MedPro - The Plot Thickens

[demographic]

There was some mention of Gove being implicated also if I remember right.

Correct

"...on 8 May 2020, that Mone wrote an email to her fellow Tory peer Theodore Agnew, then a minister in charge of procurement, copying in Michael Gove, at the time the Cabinet Office minister. For both, she used their private email addresses."

Aye, the Private Email address thing. Amongst other reasons its so there's less oversight of dodgy doings.

[Phoenix]

Extracts from Hancock's book - serialised by the Daily Fail.

"Mr Hancock has revealed that the baroness demanded his 'urgent help' with a second company – which he has not named – in June last year." Later exposed by The Guardian and probably Private Eye.

"In his diaries he writes: 'Baroness Michelle Mone has sent me an extraordinarily aggressive email complaining that a company she's helping isn't getting the multi-million-pound contracts it deserves.

She claims the firm, which makes lateral flow test kits, 'has had a dreadful time' trying to cut through red tape and demanded my 'urgent help' before it all comes out in the media.

'I am going to blow this all wide open,' she threatened.'

In his book, Mr Hancock adds: 'By the end of the message, she seemed to have worked herself into a complete frenzy and was throwing around wild accusations. 'I smell a rat here. It is more than the usual red tape, incompetence and bureaucracy. That's expected! I believe there is corruption here at the highest levels'.'

He continues: 'She concluded by urging me to intervene 'to prevent the next bombshell being dropped on the Government'.

'I read the message again, stunned. Was she threatening me? It certainly looked that way.'

She was reported to have aggressively lobbied Michael Gove and Lord Agnew in May 2020 to secure lucrative business for the company which supplies face masks and medical gowns.

Mr Gove, then-Cabinet Officer minister, was said to have been left so exasperated by her insistence that he described her as a 'right pain in the arse', the Sunday Times reported.

Her tone was said to have changed when she felt the government was taking too long to respond, pressing Lord Agnew again via email and telephone attempting to 'accelerate' the process.

'She was rude, abrasive and bullying... her hectoring tone was very irritating,' a source familiar with the exchange told the Sunday Times."

"A team from the NCA international corruption unit are examining a range of offences that may have been committed, including bribery and fraud."

P.S. I think it was a little silly of The Guardian's editor leading this with story today especially since most of the MSM are hysterically running the M&H story - miles and miles of nonsense and of course the football.

[irie]

There is interesting background to PPE acquisition problems. May be behind paywall so quoted in full.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/1 ... -outbreak/

China ‘began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’

China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say

China began severely restricting the export of personal protective equipment (PPE), such as gowns and masks, months before notifying the world of the outbreak of Covid-19, it has emerged.

PPE exports to the US fell by around 50 per cent between August and September of 2019, in a significant drop which raised alarm bells at key US government agencies.

China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts said.

The fall in PPE supplies exiting China, the world’s biggest manufacturer of PPE, raises new questions about the true timeline of the emergence of SARS-CoV-2.

An altered timeline would significantly challenge the theory that the pandemic originated from a seafood market in Wuhan, where the first cases emerged in December 2019.

The anomaly was uncovered by former US government officials including Dr Tom McGinn, a Senior Health Advisor at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Colonel John Hoffman, a Senior Research Fellow with the Food Protection and Defence Institute whose career spans decades in US government and military.

The pair were unconvinced that the virus had started at the Wuhan Wet Market in December 2019, after and began looking for an alternative theory.

After scouring a Customs and Border Protection database which tracks goods entering the US, they noticed China had started hoarding PPE far earlier than the initial date of the outbreak.

“You can go and look about three years back [at import data]”, said Colonel Hoffman. “This is not the normal up and down that occurs”

The pair presented the information to DHS’s Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Office, which declined to investigate, saying the drop reflected normal supply fluctuations.

However when Col Hoffman contacted one of America’s biggest hospital networks, HCA Healthcare, the organisation confirmed it was highly unusual.

Surgical gowns on backorder in September 2019

A representative of HCA, which operates around 200 hospitals and 2,000 clinics, reported surgical gowns and drapes went on backorder in late September 2019, leaving hospitals scrambling.

“I asked HCA folks if this had happened anytime recently”, Col Hoffman added.

“The answer was no—they could not remember ever seeing so much of this stuff on back order.”

David Asher, a former State Department official who played a key role in the pandemic response and now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, says the shortage was also caused by Chinese government efforts to buy up global PPE stocks in the US, Europe and Australia.

“It was a persistent uptick [of Chinese purchasing]”, said Dr Asher. “And it was significant enough that my colleagues at DHS heard about it from American companies that manufacture PPE, and most importantly from US hospitals reporting they weren’t able to get the normal supply of masks, gloves, gowns and goggles”.

China’s campaign to snatch up global PPE stocks and ship them back to China at the start of the pandemic in January and February 2020.

But earlier purchasing efforts from August and September 2019, call into question whether the Chinese were aware of an outbreak earlier.

Many experts now think that the Covid-19 could have leaked from experiments carried out at Dr Shi Zhengli’s lab at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), which was studying bat-borne coronaviruses.

The restricting of PPE exports came around the same time that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) removed a database of bat virus gene sequences, which has never been restored.

Dr McGinn and Col Hoffman also consulted senior scientists at EcoHealth Alliance, the non-profit organisation known for funnelling US government funding to Dr Shi Zhengli’s lab at WIV.

The EcoHealth Alliance scientists confirmed that “the pandemic could not have started at the Wuhan wet market,” according to a source who requested anonymity for security reasons.

Studies also support the idea that Covid was around earlier than previously thought. A 2021 report by the US Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows an Italian boy was infected in November 2019.

A separate study by scientists in Milan found a woman had been infected that same month, while British research suggested the outbreak began as early as October 2019.

Experts say they are bewildered by the failure to investigate the PPE shortage which the argue amounts to a cover up. They claim that knowledge from an inquiry could have been critical to not just understanding the origin of the pandemic but to safeguarding the public.

“The DHS failure to further investigate led to them covering up their dereliction of duty”, added Col Hoffman, “which was then further hidden to gain deniability for [their] actions”.

DHS have been approached for comment.

[Horse]

The UK ran down its PPE stocks, despite there having been planning for pandemics.

[Phoenix]

There is interesting background to PPE acquisition problems. May be behind paywall so quoted in full.

A little trick for those interested. If you come across a paywall configure your browser to go into read mode. I use Brave Browser. On the address bar it shows four horizontal lines. Click and Hey Presto the wall falls down! If nothing else it will kill all those annoying ‘Subscribe’ pop-ups. I’ve not tested it on all paywalls - you’ll have to do it for yourselves. Likewise, I haven’t tried it out on other browsers - too many.

I use it for mainly old articles. Current news can be had for free across a multitude of web sites such as the BBC.

By the by. Irie’s Link can be read without any tricks.

[Horse]

That all looks pretty standard to me, anyone that has had to deal with procurement on purchases of £10m+ type scale will know it's like being on the Krypton Factor and you have to jump through hoops and climb waterfalls,

I've worked on a lot of 'government' projects awarded through the 'SPaTS' procurement processes (ok in the £100sK, not millions) and what happened during Covid seemed to bear no relation.

[Count Steer]

There is interesting background to PPE acquisition problems. May be behind paywall so quoted in full.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/1 ... -outbreak/

China ‘began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’

China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say

Whether the conclusions are right or not, there's so much wrong in journalistic terms in that article it's hard to know where to start.

'Experts say...' and 'they' say it several times.

Is the Colonel an ex DHS employee? They blur it.

Etc etc.

Bellingcat standard it ain't.

[irie]

There is interesting background to PPE acquisition problems. May be behind paywall so quoted in full.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/1 ... -outbreak/

China ‘began stockpiling PPE months before Covid outbreak’

China also started to buy up global PPE stocks in Europe, Australia and the US around the same time, experts say

Whether the conclusions are right or not, there's so much wrong in journalistic terms in that article it's hard to know where to start.

'Experts say...' and 'they' say it several times.

Is the Colonel an ex DHS employee? They blur it.

Etc etc.

Bellingcat standard it ain't.

Sloppy journalism. However, it is consistent with the fact that Covid was discovered in historical sewerage water samples taken in Milan and Turin as early as December 2019.

https://www.reuters.com/article/health- ... NL1N2DV2XE

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7428442/

[Horse]

That all looks pretty standard to me, anyone that has had to deal with procurement on purchases of £10m+ type scale will know it's like being on the Krypton Factor and you have to jump through hoops and climb waterfalls,

I've worked on a lot of 'government' projects awarded through the 'SPaTS' procurement processes (ok in the £100sK, not millions) and what happened during Covid seemed to bear no relation.

I don't doubt it, there are mechanisms to side-step governance in some circumstances, it needs a high level sign-off.

So not really 'standard'.

The pitfalls are when the high level signer is shitting himself if he doesn't get orders fulfilled and might end up with an empty table, so he signs off everything without really understanding what is about to happen - at that point all manner of shyster sales/BD type people will over promise and under deliver with promises of rainbows and unicorns just to win contracts.

Indeed. Ferry contract to a company with no ships. PPE that wasn't fit for purpose, etc.

With the apparent bonus, it seems, of high-level shysters involved too.

But nothing to Mone 'bout.

[cheb]

It just sounds like the usual government gravy train but with extra zeros.

[Cousin Jack]

Standard practice when dealing with niaive purchasers is to promise rainbows and unicorns. Most government departments are niaive purchasers.

[Mr. Dazzle]

Our old head of quality used to say: "You must always remember, nobody wants to work in Quality".

I imagine procurement is even worse.

[Count Steer]

Our old head of quality used to say: "You must always remember, nobody wants to work in Quality".

I imagine procurement is even worse.

We always said Audit was for people who found Accounting too exciting.

[demographic]

Just standard practice that she denied anything to do with them and then got a 29 million backhander.


Maybe standard practice needs to be changed a bit?

[Phoenix]

In his unique and inimitable style, Ros Atkins of the BBC delivers the facts.

If only all news could be delivered this way.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-63977886

Be Good. Take Care

[DefTrap]

Our old head of quality used to say: "You must always remember, nobody wants to work in Quality".

Technically I work in Quality, and I've always been convinced it's mainly because nobody else can be arsed with it.

[Mr. Dazzle]

You know what...I'm actually not surprised.

[Count Steer]

You know what...I'm actually not surprised.

That's the worrying thing. Nobody is surprised, like it's normal to support a party, get rewarded with a seat in the Lords and then a VIP place in the line for the 'snouts in the taxpayers money' trough. After all these years of it everyone just shrugs and says 'Well, yeah, that's just what happens innit?'

[Mr. Dazzle]

No I mean I'm not surprised Deftrap works in quality

[Count Steer]

No I mean I'm not surprised Deftrap works in quality

Ah.

(So did I for a while....they thought 'cos I was a CEng I was clearly an IT Kwality guru. ).